The Life of Cowley, notwithstanding the penury of English biography, has been written
by Dr. Sprat, an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have
deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature; but his zeal of friendship, or ambition
of eloquence, has produced a funeral oration rather than a history: he has given the
character, not the life, of Cowley; for he writes with so little detail, that scarcely anything
is distinctly known, but all is shown confused and enlarged through the mist of panegyric.
Abraham Cowley was born in the year one thousand sir hundred and eighteen. His father
was a grocer, whose condition Dr. Sprat conceals under the general appellation of a
citizen; and, what would probably not have been less carefully suppressed, the omission
of his name in the register of St. Dunstan's parish gives reason to suspect that his father
was a sectary. Whoever he was, he died before the birth of his son, and consequently left
him to the care of his mother: whom Wood represents as struggling earnestly to procure
him a literary education, and who, as she lived to the age of eighty, had her solicitude
rewarded by seeing her son eminent, and, I hope, by seeing him fortunate, and partaking
his prosperity. We know at least, from Sprat's account, that he always acknowledged her
care, and justly paid the dues of filial gratitude.
In the window of his mother's apartment lay Spenser's "Fairy Queen," in which he very
early took delight to read, till by feeling the charms of verse, he became, as he relates,
irrecoverably a poet. Such are the accidents which, sometimes remembered, and perhaps
sometimes forgotten, produce that particular designation of mind, and propensity for
some certain science or employment, which is commonly called Genius. The true Genius
is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter of the present age, had the first fondness for his art
excited by the perusal of Richardson's treatise.
By his mother's solicitation he was admitted into Westminster school, where he was soon
distinguished. He was wont, says Sprat, to relate, "that he had this defect in his memory
at that time, that his teachers never could bring it to retain the ordinary rules of
grammar."
This is an instance of the natural desire of man to propagate a wonder. It is surely very
difficult to tell anything as it was heard, when Sprat could not refrain from amplifying a
commodious incident, though the book to which he prefixed his narrative contained its
confutation. A memory admitting some things, and rejecting others, an intellectual
digestion that concocted the pulp of learning, but refused the husks, had the appearance
of an instinctive elegance, of a particular provision made by nature for literary politeness.
But in the author's own honest relation, the marvel vanishes: he was, he says, such "an
enemy to all constraint, that his master never could prevail on him to learn the rules
without book." He does not tell that he could not learn the rules; but that, being able to
perform his exercises without them, and being an "enemy to constraint," he spared
himself the labour.
